Nearly 2008 & Product Feeds Are Still Pants!
3 Comments September 21, 2007 / Posted in Product FeedsProduct feeds: Are they so difficult to get right? If I had loads of hair I’d be bald from pulling it out at the problems feeds produce, but as I don’t have that much hair I’m simply forced to rant like a manic Victor Meldrew at the inanimate PC monitor!
So, what is causing this uncharacteristic level of grumpiness….
Wrong categorisation Do try and categorise your products! for example Thanks Darling submissively categorises their stuff under “Adult Gifts” – i.e. the same Adult Gifts section which is dominated by Ann Summers?
” and ‘ at the start of the product names and descriptions! Merchants – I don’t need you to do this, in fact it’s better if you didn’t! If we’re trying to list all Washing Machines beginning with A.. and you describe it ‘A Washing Machine’ you won’t show up!
Empty Descriptions!: Not that much of an issue – unless they’re combined with…
Lacklustre Product Names!: Panasonic Camcorder may well be a good description for one item, but not for 10 items that are all different types of Panasonic Camcorder. XYZ123 Panasonic Camcorder or Sony Bravia 32in XYZ123 TV gives an affiliate so much more information to use… and allows price comparison! No model id, no comparison, no sales!
No Feeds! The quickest and often easiest way to get your program circulating is with a product feed. Webgains are usually pretty good at launching a merchant and having a feed ready at launch. Affiliate Window aren’t bad either! Everyone else go and sit on the naughty step!
Feeds But Merchant Closed! We automate a lot of things, so if a merchant has closed can networks please do us a favour and switch off the feed, remove the site from the feed list and bury all knowledge of the feed from existence.
No Images or Broken Images: Makes our information look bad and looks like you don’t care. So make sure when you change your site, you update your images in your feed. And Cameras2U if you’re going to use a “no image” link, make sure it exists! Oh and Boardsportwarehouse – why have images if no one can show them?
Total & Utter Disasters!: Some merchants manage to make a complete and utter pigs ear, pigs buttocks and little piggy droppings out of their feeds – and manage to combine a number of the issues above.
I know that often it’s not the networks fault, and that technical issues arise – but quality control needs to come from source! Some of the issues I’ve outlined above seem to be ongoing and whilst yes I should report them (when they’re found) it is concerning that there doesn’t seem to be ongoing quality checks on feed management – if there was then I’d not have spent the last 5 hours trying to tidy up feed databases so that we can promote merchants and try and make sales with the feeds supplied.
As the big sales time is on it’s way, perhaps it might be a good time for all networks and merchants to review their feeds and make sure everything is up to standard, product names are right, categorisation is sensible, images aren’t broken and above all the feed is up to date too!
A year ago I set up a site with the Evans Cycles feed from Affiliate Window, and it was very nicely categorised (mountain bikes, BMX, helmets, saddles etc) which made it easy to make a site. A £1500 bike order came through the other day and I thought to myself “right, that old bike site of mine deserves some attention”, so I got an updated feed and in place of the helpful categories, there was now just two categories: “Cycling” and blank.
Their product feed from a year was far better to their current one. That’s the opposite of progress and kind of annoying.
That’s just one example – it would be very easy to make up a list of product feed disasters, so this is a great post to flag up such a weak area in affiliate marketing. Looking at the mess some product feeds are, I can only imagine they’ve been put together by people who don’t know how affiliates actually use them.
I get seriously annoyed with the feeds at the moment. Some seriously bad advice is being given to AW merchants in respect of what each category should be called. When AW then permitted direct merchant categorisation I thought “great, no more rubbish category names”. How wrong I was. Cos AW went on to advise merchants what categories should be made available.
Now so many merchants have a single category or just a handful (irrespective of the network they are on), that I shall not be promoting over 70% of all merchants from the previous year.
It’s about time some of the merchants invested some of their huge profits in improving product feeds for affiliates. I’m an affiliate for Amazon UK and they have never updated the book cover images that are displayed on my site. Even though i know for a fact more up-to-date titles have been published.